1. Priority Claim.
This application claims the benefit of priority from European Patent Application No. 05009446.5, filed Apr. 29, 2005, which is incorporated by reference.
2. Technical Field.
This application relates to an audio signal processing system, and more particularly to a dereverberation and feedback compensation system.
3. Related Art.
Verbal communication may be affected by a noisy background. This may occur when passengers in a vehicle attempt to communicate with one another. At high traveling speeds, dialogs between back and front passengers may be easily disturbed by background noise. If additional audio signals, such as from a radio, a compact disc (“CD”) player, and/or a digital video disc (“DVD”) player are output during the conversation, the intelligibility of the utterances further deteriorates.
To improve the intelligibility of the passengers' utterances, some communication systems installed within vehicles use microphones installed near each seat of the cabin which can detect speech signals from the passengers. The signal received by the microphones are processed by a signal processor and converted into audible sound by loudspeakers. Speech signals from one area in the vehicle may be redirected by the communication system to another area of the vehicle. Since the reverberation characteristics of vehicular cabins are sometimes complex, some of these systems produce acoustic feedback that may result in a breakdown of communication.
In addition to the microphones detecting the speech signals of the passengers, the microphones may detect audio signals generated by an audio device, such as a radio, a CD player, a DVD player, and/or any other audio device. The communication system may process these audio signals and convert the signals to audible sound through loudspeakers. These detected audio signals may generate electro-acoustic reverberations.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved communication system that facilitates passengers' conversation in vehicular cabins.